And Cosette, nestling close to Marius, caressed his ear with an angelic
whisper: "So it is true. My name is Marius. I am Madame Thou."

These two creatures were resplendent. They had reached that irrevocable
and irrecoverable moment, at the dazzling intersection of all youth and
all joy. They realized the verses of Jean Prouvaire; they were forty
years old taken together. It was marriage sublimated; these two children
were two lilies. They did not see each other, they did not contemplate
each other. Cosette perceived Marius in the midst of a glory; Marius
perceived Cosette on an altar. And on that altar, and in that glory, the
two apotheoses mingling, in the background, one knows not how, behind a
cloud for Cosette, in a flash for Marius, there was the ideal thing, the
real thing, the meeting of the kiss and the dream, the nuptial pillow.
All the torments through which they had passed came back to them in
intoxication. It seemed to them that their sorrows, their sleepless
nights, their tears, their anguish, their terrors, their despair,
converted into caresses and rays of light, rendered still more charming
the charming hour which was approaching; and that their griefs were but
so many handmaidens who were preparing the toilet of joy. How good it is
to have suffered! Their unhappiness formed a halo round their happiness.
The long agony of their love was terminating in an ascension.

It was the same enchantment in two souls, tinged with voluptuousness
in Marius, and with modesty in Cosette. They said to each other in low
tones: "We will go back to take a look at our little garden in the Rue
Plumet." The folds of Cosette's gown lay across Marius.

Such a day is an ineffable mixture of dream and of reality. One
possesses and one supposes. One still has time before one to divine. The
emotion on that day, of being at mid-day and of dreaming of midnight
is indescribable. The delights of these two hearts overflowed upon the
crowd, and inspired the passers-by with cheerfulness.

People halted in the Rue Saint-Antoine, in front of Saint-Paul, to gaze
through the windows of the carriage at the orange-flowers quivering on
Cosette's head.

Then they returned home to the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire. Marius,
triumphant and radiant, mounted side by side with Cosette the staircase
up which he had been borne in a dying condition. The poor, who had
trooped to the door, and who shared their purses, blessed them. There
were flowers e